I want to, but can’t. That’s for a lot of reasons — for one, it’s time. I write a lot. I have a five-year-old. Life intrudes. My reading is also broader, now. Writing comics means I read more comics. I also do a lot of research and read non-fiction — more non-fic than fic, I think. The other thing, though, is that I know how the sausage is made. I know because I make it every day. My hands are unctuous with narrative pigfat. I find that as you do a thing more and more, you become more persnickety about that overall thing. Example: there’s a farm-to-table ice cream place not far from us, and the owner has very strong opinions about ice cream. Who gets it wrong, who gets it right, what techniques are best, or laziest, or who is sexier, BEN or JERRY. I don’t have those kinds of strong opinions about ice cream because fuck you, it’s ice cream. Bad ice cream is better than no ice cream. Shove it in my bone-cave. All of it. NOW PLEASE.

But! I have strong reactions to novels. Stronger than I used to. I’m like a stage magician where it’s harder to fool me with your magic because I know all the tricks. I can see the misdirection coming a mile away. That means I probably start and put down four novels for every one that I pick up and finish. I don’t throw those first four down in rage before urinating upon them. I just quietly set the book aside, say “This book is not for me,” and then I urinate on it. No rage at all. Only smug beneficence paired with my steaming asparagus pee!

Kidding, kidding. No pee.

But I thought, okay, it might be interesting to unpack a little bit why I pick up some books and then put them down after five, ten, thirty pages. This is true of manuscripts both published and unpublished. And it’s important to note here that none of what I’m about to say is gospel. Some of these books reached shelves. Many of these books do very well despite what I’m telling you here. Which is to say, the list of reasons I’m about to give are intensely personal to me and not in any way good guidelines to follow. Why even include them? First, because I want to unpack it for my own curiosity (and this blog is for me before it is for you), and second because maybe the conversation will trigger something in your thoughts about your own work, or it’ll inspire some interesting and spirited conversation in the comments below.

(I encourage you to use the comments to answer the question: what makes you put down a book?)

Let’s begin.

1. I just don’t want to read it. This isn’t a helpful comment by any stretch of the imagination but it’s vital I get it out there — sometimes, I pick up a book, I start a book, and it’s a puzzle piece whose nubbins and divots don’t line up with mine. Book’s not for me. I’m not for it. End of story.

2. I have no context. None. Zero. Crafting the first thirty or so pages of a book is itself a vital and elusive art. You are required to pack so much into so little while at the same time not overdoing it. But the greatest thing missing from too many books is context. Books that begin with characters just doing shit or saying shit or thinking shit are fine — but from the first page, I want context. I don’t need all the details, but I need some sense of what’s going on and why. I need to be rooted in the story fast as you can get me there. You can meander, but goddamnit, meander with purpose. I need to know why you’re writing it, why the character is here, and why I should give a hot cup of fuck in the first place. This isn’t easy to do! Writing those early pages is a combat landing in terms of narrative — you’ve got to pull us all the way from the atmosphere to the ground in a thousand words. It’s hard, but WE NEEDS THE CONTEXT, PRECIOUS. *gums a fish*

3. Another thing I need that you’re not giving me: stakes. This is tied into the context. But if I don’t know the stakes — what can be won, what can be lost, what’s on the table — then why am I reading? Why are we here? Where are my pants?

4. Too much action. Once again, this is tied a little into the context problem, but I really hate books where I start them and suddenly we’re thrown into BULLETS WHIZZING AND KARATE WHALES AND A THOUSAND CREAMY PASTRY NINJAS and it’s five pages of cool-ass katana action and yet I have no idea what’s happening. Every punch is clear as day, but the motivation behind the scene or sequence is invisible. Realize that the mechanisms for resolving conflict are not the same as the conflict. A fistfight is not a conflict. Why they’re punching the beefy fuck out of each other? That’s the conflict. Jealousy. Stolen property. Revenge. Whatever. Conflict is the reason behind the fight, not the fight itself.

5. The book is all surface. A story isn’t just one thing. It can’t just be what you see, what you read — it has innumerable added layers, all invisible but still keenly felt. Like, okay, consider a sports car. The fanciest fastest motherfucker you can think of. The love child of a Lamborghini and a SR-71 jet. That car isn’t a model. It’s more than its frame and its paint job. Some of the interior you can see: seats, dashboard, steering wheel. Some parts you can see only if you look hard: the engine under the hood, the dead guy in the trunk. (I know cars like that don’t have trunks you can use to store dead bodies, but just play pretend.) Other parts will never be seen by you: the engine’s deepest interior, or the endless human and machine hours put into designing the car and the engine and the experience of the car. The car is more than just its function, too. It has style. It has a vibe. Designers don’t just plunk down a seat thinking, WELL THE DRIVER NEEDS TO SIT. It’s that, but then it transcends function. It becomes, how do we want the driver to feel? How do we want him to look in his own head and to other drivers? The car has a theme, a mood, it has a message. Your story is like that — or, it should be. It can’t just be CHARACTERS SAY SHIT AND DO SHIT. That’s there, but it’s just the paint job. A story operating without deeper layers is a shallow narrative, and I ain’t got time for that.

6. The characters all sound the same.

7. The book starts off too, um, genre-shellacked. What I mean is, if it’s sci-fi, it’s loaded for bear with bewildering sciencey stuff, or if it’s fantasy it’s all funky names with magical apostrophes, or if it’s horror it’s more interested in soaking the pages in raw, red gore and horror tropes. Context is king, yet again. Character is everything. Root me in the character. Make me care. Then layer in the genre elements. It’s like a cake — it’s easy to make icing taste good, but too much of it is gross. (Don’t tell this to my son, who will vacuum the icing into his maw while discarding the cake part. The little barbarian.) The cake is the foundation. It’s what holds up the rest of the stuff. Cake is character, character is cake. Now I’m hungry. I want cake. Someone get me cake. YOU THERE IN THE THIRD ROW. CAKE ME. NOW.

8. Speaking of genre, I’ll put a book down if it feels too samey-samey. It’s not that you can’t do interesting things with well-wrought tropes, but usually, I can tell when you’ve performed the narrative equivalent of a Human Centipede — where you digest one kind of fiction and then excrete that fiction back out into the world. It’s like Taco Bell — you’re just renting it and returning it to the ecosystem without actually processing it. I’d rather you make the genre yours. I’d rather you read more broadly and bring outside influence to the work.

9. No voice at all. This is a personal preference, to be clear — some readers want an author who disappears into the background. I don’t. I want the author to emerge a little, like a shadow in the rain. Sometimes that means word choice or sentence construction or rhythm. Sometimes it’s in the themes that present themselves. The book isn’t ALL YOU, ALL THE TIME, but I still want to see your bloody fingerprints at the margins of the page. I’ll put it this way: Dan Brown’s work is, to me, about as cardboardy as it comes. No harm or foul, because hey, his books are whiz-bang successes. But then you look at someone like Stephen King, whose work always reads like Stephen King. His ease of storytelling doesn’t betray his voice. Daniel Jose Older’s work feels like Daniel Jose Older’s work. Victoria Schwab’s work feels like — drum roll please — Victoria Schwab’s work. (I like these authors because when I read their work, it’s not that I know what I’m in for, it’s that I know I’m in the company of a capable, confident storyteller. Some authors view this as a brand, but a brand is about a pre-existing set of chosen permutations — a brand is about comfort. I want voice. I want to trust in the story even as it brings me discomfort.)

10. Too much voice will kill my interest, too. Comes a point where you gotta get out of the way of your own story. (Again: Stephen King is amazing at this. His work feels like his work, but he’s also not tap-dancing in front of the tale — he sits very comfortably behind the curtain.) Your story isn’t a stunt. It isn’t a stage. You’re playing drums, not playing lead guitar.

11. I’m bored. I get bored easily, to be clear. In this day and age, I’ve got a lot of very dumb stuff competing for my attention and I fall prey to it too easily — it’s a lot easier to check Twitter than read a novel. People could read a book, or they could hunt Pokemon. At the same time, though, I don’t think it’s an unfair ask when I say it’s important a story be interesting. One of the most vital goals of a storyteller is to capture attention. It’s like trapping a fly in a cup. It is necessary to be able to — from the first sentence — snap your fingers and hypnotize me with the tale at hand. And that means being interesting. The question of what’s interesting, however, is a many-headed, snarly beast, but at the very least, look to how one tells a story in person. Think about how you would keep people’s attention. How would you spark their interest? How might you give them just enough to keep listening? Worry, danger, conflict, desire. Imagine telling a story in such a way that if you just quit in the middle of a sentence, you’d leave people hanging with a HOLY SHIT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT look on their dumbfounded faces. Write a book like that.

12 . The balance of mystery is off. Mystery is tricky. Every mystery is a question mark, and as I am all-too-fond of repeating, a question mark is shaped like a hook for a reason. It sticks in you and pulls you along. But too many question marks and you’re pulled into asplodey viscera like that guy from Hellraiser. We need mystery early on — little mysteries that tease us forward without overwhelming. Or one big mystery that will cast its void-like shadow over everything. We still need a rope to feel for in the dark, though — something we use to pull ourselves a long. Too many questions, too much mystery, and we feel lost. We have no rope, no anchor. We have only hooks and darkness. And also cake. What I mean is, I’m still hungry for cake, you bastards.

13. Not enough cake in your story.

13. Fine, here’s a real #13: JESUS GOD THIS BOOK IS SLOW. I don’t need every book to have thriller pacing, though I admit I do prefer a snappier, zippier narrative. But while I do not require your book to read like it’s duct-taped to the back of a cheetah fixed with some manner of rectal rocket, I do want to feel like we’re getting somewhere in a way that respects the story and respects the time of the reader. Some books I read I feel like that stormtrooper on Tatooine — “Move along, old man in a landspeeder. Go on, just go, c’mon. Vertical pedal on the right, Grandpa Kenobi, chop-chop.” A story is liquid. A story moves. It doesn’t need to be a raging rapids, but don’t let it be a stagnant puddle. That’s how you get mosquitoes.

14. The story is too busy, too early. Cleave to simplicity. Simple goals are better than complicated ones. You can build up to bigger conflicts, but at the fore, think conflicts that are primal, that are easily parsed by the largest number of us. A lost child. Revenge for a death. Grieving over someone gone. Broken love. Simple, forthright things will grab us and root us. Common, fundamental problems are key — then you can spin them in whatever way fits the story (A DRAGON WANTS REVENGE ON A LIVING STARSHIP BECAUSE IT KILLED HIS ROBOT LOVER). Start small. Begin simple. Complexity comes later.

15. Also, this is true with language, too. If your book’s language is muddy or bombastic, I’ll check right out. Aim for clarity above any kind of GRAND MAJESTY OF THE HUMAN TONGUE. You’re not trying to impress us with frippery. Writing is a mechanism. It is a means to an end. Writing conveys more than itself. Writing is a conveyance for story, for idea, for character, for theme, for vision. Seek substance over style. Pursue precision in language over a noisy parade of words.

16. The character has done something I hate. And this is a weird thing, because it’s not a character’s job to be likable or to perform actions perfectly in line with my own morality, but if by page five I find out he’s a puppy-kicking baby-shitting rapist, I’m done. Sorry. Maybe this is a tale of his redemption or maybe you just want me to empathize with this horrible person, and that’s fair. I’m just not going to do it. I don’t need characters to be likable. I do, however, need them to be livable — meaning, I need to find some reason to want to live with that individual for 300+ pages. Some things are dealbreakers, though, and a character who is too vile or somehow unredeemable by my own metric… then I just can’t stay in the story.

17. Whoa, way too heavy a hand with the worldbuilding, pal. Ease back on the infinite details, okay? The worldbuilding should serve the story. The story is not just a vehicle for worldbuilding. I want to eat a meal, not stare at the plate. The plate can be lovely! You can work very hard on the plate. But not, I’m afraid, at the cost of the food that sits upon it.

18. Similar to the above? Your book has way, way too much exposition. Exposition is not the devil. We like exposition… ennnh, within reason. I like to treat exposition as if it’s a dirty necessity. It is an unpleasant act that must be fulfilled — it is, in a way, like air travel. Nobody likes air travel. These days, air travel is basically just SKY BUS, full of as many dubious weirdos, like that guy who keeps taking off his shoes, or that other guy who sweats hoagie oil, or those people who were somehow allowed to bring on a Tupperware tub of warm sauerkraut. But if you wanna get to that place you wanna go: you hop on the plane and you get it over with. Exposition is an act that is best served by figuring out how little of it you can get away with while still serving and continuing the tale. Get in. Get out. Get it over with.

19. OH MY GOD I AM BEING CRUSHED BY THESE WALLS OF TEXT. Stories are beholden to rhythm. Short sentences, long sentences, diverse paragraphs, mixed-up word choice. But if I open a book and it’s just one epic paragraph after another, after another, after another, my eyes start to become tired. I pee myself and pass out. It’s not a good scene.

21. I gain no sense of why now? Every story you write should begin with that essential question: why is this story happening now? If we are to assume that a story is a break in the status quo — and to my mind, stories are exactly that — then the timing of the story is vital. What precipitated the narrative? What events inside the story make it necessary, and necessary at this moment? Did someone just steal the Death Star plans? Is this a Christmas party set in a building just as German terrorist-thieves are about to initiate an, erm, hostile takeover? Has there been a wedding? A funeral? A discovery? An attack? HAS THERE BEEN AN AWAKENING AND HAVE YOU FELT IT? Some stories lack an answer to that question, why now, and I can feel it. It undercuts the urgency of the tale. And urgency is everything. Creating urgency makes the story feel vital and it keeps people reading. (Lending the narrative that urgency is a lesson unto itself, of course.)

22. Not enough sodomy. Okay, just seeing if you’re still reading. But seriously: cake and sodomy.

22. Okay, real #22 — the plot exists outside the characters. They do not control it. They do not contribute to it. Nobody is directing it but you, the Overarching God-Author. You’re like a railroading DM who has the adventure set one way and any time the party wants to try something different (“We’d like to make friends with the Demogorgon!”) you short-circuit and punch the plot to do what you want it to do, not what feels natural to the characters, their motivations, and their actions. Plot should be internal, growing into the narrative like coral, like bones, but yours is external: it’s all exoskeleton, all scaffolding.

23. The plot exists only because of stupid, wrong people and their very bad, very stinky decisions. I’m not saying characters cannot and should not make mistakes. Characters needn’t — and shouldn’t — be perfect. But if the plot only exists because they’re jerky dumdums who just make jerky dumdum decisions, then ennnnyyeaaaah not for me. I prefer you treat your characters as if they’re all intelligent with respect to their own worlds. That doesn’t mean high-IQ. It doesn’t mean a plumber knows how to build a fucking teleporter. It just means within respect to their own life and experience they have some smarts going on.

24. Your characters aren’t acting like people. They’re acting like plot devices. This is related to #22 and #23, but what I mean is, you can feel how they’re acting against logic and their own emotional intelligence to further plot points. They keep secrets when keeping secrets is neither prudent nor interesting — it’s just that the secret is what keeps the plot alive. They lie when it makes no sense to lie. They perform actions like the victims in the horror movie, just stumbling into danger because they need to die to chain to the next scene in the sequence of events.

25. Everything is just a series of scenes. Scenes need to connect. They are bound by a throughline. But yours just feel like disconnected bits — vignettes and moments and setpieces that have been placed next to each other but given no connection. They are rooms without doors or windows.

* * *

INVASIVE:

“Think Thomas Harris’ Will Graham and Clarice Starling rolled into one and pitched on the knife’s edge of a scenario that makes Jurassic Park look like a carnival ride. Another rip-roaring, deeply paranoid thriller about the reasons to fear the future.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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212 Comments

Don’t hold back. Tell me how you really feel…
Great points, and I find myself checking out of books for many of the same reasons. I realize I’m still an asshole for doing so, but at least I know I’m not alone in my assholery.

I love your writing posts. They helped me figure out this prose-writing-thing, and now I’m having an essay and a short story published, and am way more confident in my plotting/novel structuring. So, yeah, thanks.

I don’t know if I have real specifics on why I stop reading a book. It is something that, for me, happens very rarely. I am now a father of a 16 yr old and a 20 yr old, so I have more time than I’ve had in years to read as much as I want. I’m also not a writer, so I’m like you with ice cream. Basically, I quit a book if I find I’m looking for anything else to do but read the book. If I never feel the desire to pick it up and read it, it’s obviously not for me. I’ve never really thought about the why behind this.

I did once quit reading a book because the author used the word irony too many times.

A. Freaking. Men. Thank you for posting this because I was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with me. LOL I DNF books at an alarming rate lately.

Unfortunately, I’m actually at the point that if I don’t want to click “buy now” at the end of the Kindle preview, it’s not getting read. Even then, sometimes I stop reading it and delete it off my Kindle.

Life is too short for bad books. And with so much signal-to-noise lately, sometimes it’s difficult to find books that will hold my interest long enough for me to want to invest the time and energy in them.

I’ve got a less binary process for what I do after finishing a Kindle preview if you’re interested in softening your ways any (not that you were asking; just saying). I have a three collections: Less Than 10, Less Than 6 and Less Than 3. If I don’t buy the book right now, I’ll buy it once it reaches one of those three price points and if I’ve got nothing better to read.

Your newest book has THE BEST COVER ART I think I have ever seen. Your book cover graphic is going to make me buy your book. Thank you. And this is from a person whose home was just invaded by non-subterranean termites.

Your list is more extensive than mine. However, I do tend to close the cover when the characters do really stupid things and for no other reason than to advance the plot. You know:

Warrior: Stay right here and you’ll be safe.
Person to be protected: Okay.
Shortly thereafter Person to be protected decides to leave safe place because, I don’t know, they get bored, or have to relieve themselves or decide they want to check out the area. Because, hey, you can’t up the anti without someone doing a stupid thing so they can get caught by the enemy.

I read first, with a thirst for words. But then they started to sound the same. The I started to write. Noe I see the hunger games mixed with Fahrenheit 451 added to Divergence mixed with Dallas. I’m becoming less tolerant and more an ice cream snob, which the good docs have put on the no no list. I’m more entertained by the blogs you write than most classical lit.

Present tense, and I think you helped me finally understand why. It goes back to lack of context. It seems difficult to get context quickly enough, particularly with first person present tense, so I just put it down.

Well put. As part of 17 & 18 above I would add “too many made-up names doing too much esoteric stuff all at once.” H’mfr’kladieskrn, reigning Gra’afplez of the Egotanleshro Empire needs simple actions and sidekicks for the first few paragraphs.

The major reason I put a book down is when the women in the novel do inexplicable, garbage things simply because they are women. Like when authors only let women have emotional reactions — and those reactions happen to be hysterical crying — while the men characters set their jaws and go off to save the day. I can forgive it (almost) if the book is really old, but it’s shocking how many modern writers are still pulling that crap.

I also put books down when an author can’t write real women characters. For this reason, I have never made it all the way through a Stephen King novel.

I very, very rarely DNF a novel, but I recently put one down, never to pick it up again, for this very reason. The FMC was supposed to be this strong, amazing woman, but all that ever happened was that she was physically and emotionally victimized by men. And the MMC kept getting mad because he thought all the women characters were laughing at him, when they were mostly just having a bit of a joke. When I re-read the introduction, apparently all his beta readers were male. Well, buddy, there’s your problem right there.

I’ve posted more than once about my own answer to this question. Lack of voice is way up there. Too many characters and scenes feel pasted out of the Universe of Stock that we all have access to. No surprises, not in the characters’ actions, not in the diction, not in the rhythm. All stuff I’ve seen a thousand times (and don’t subject myself to any more).

What I call “illogic” fits several of these points: When something a character does or something that happens serves the prefabricated plot and not the story that wants to emerge from the characters’ interactions. I got into trouble myself once making characters do something they were screaming that they didn’t want to do. Ruined a potentially good novel, and boy, did I pay. Nothing in this post is truer than that the characters write the story. Listen to them.

This post could easily be required reading in every “creative writing” class or critique group (though it would require a language warning in most settings, i fear).

Number 16: The horrible main character! Yes! I seem to be running into it more and more lately too. I don’t need to LIKE the protagonist but I need to be able to spend several hours with him. There also needs to be at least one member of the supporting cast I DO like whose fate I care about.

I have put down two best selling books because everyone was horrible and it seemed like even the author didn’t like his cast only to hear them say in interviews how much they loved their characters so that’s a double failure. Make sure what’s in your head makes it to the page.

To quote Tad Danielewski (father of musician Poe and author Mark Danielewski, who wrote House of Leaves):

“Communication is not just words. Communication…is architecture. Because of course it is quite obvious that a house which would be built without that sense…without that desire for communication, would not look the way your house looks today.”

So, too, cars and books. A book isn’t just words, a book is communication, and communications/conversations that aren’t conveying things we care about are boring.

I put down well more books than I finish, too. The best books are those that can make me forget that I’m reading. The next are those where I know I’m reading but care what happens next to keep reading. The moment I don’t care what happens next–be it page one or page 500–I put it down.

I will always put a book down if too much shit happens before I can give a damn about the characters… if Joey pushes Becky off a cliff in the first three pages, she probably deserved it. I put the book down and go brush my cat.

I used to give a book 50 pages to hook me, but now? Not so much. If you can’t grab me within a page or two, forget it.

One of the more common reasons I will put a book down is prose that throws me out of the book. A big source of that is poor grammar or awkwardly constructed sentences. I’m not talking common usage errors or stylistic choices: if they work, they work. It’s the books that don’t appear to have passed by a grammar-educated editor at any point that bug me. If I have to mentally correct your grammar so that you make sense, forget it. I won’t work that hard.

Hmm. I bet there’s a post here at terribleminds.com about great opening sentences.

My reading habits have varied over the years, getting worse when the kids were little and then rebounding as they hit their teens and slowing as life just gets busy. A few things cause me to put a book down. #16 should be called the “Thomas Covenant Rule”, since that’s the first time I recall doing that. I’m told that the series is quite good…but the main character is a rapist and even when I was a smug 16 year-old I couldn’t walk that back, despite the ‘it’s just a dream’ excuse.

A compelling book will keep me reading, even if I’m not sure I’m enjoying it. King’s power is in his characters; I consider ‘Under the Dome’ to be kind of a mess at points (feeling as much like an angry screed against the Bush administration as a story), but the journey there is fascinating as you become embroiled in the struggles of these very interesting characters. I think that’s how I got through Lauren Buekes ‘Zoo City’, despite it not actually feeling like it went anywhere and was ultimately not much ‘there’, there.

I once put done the third ‘Song of Ice and Fire’ book when it reached the Red Wedding…because i was so emotionally overwhelmed by it. I couldn’t read it for at least a day before I picked it back up. A great book can pull that trick off.

The reason i don’t read much after the first tedious chapter…hmm…
I think because novel first chapters are like coffee; some of them are hot and tasty, and you drink it all in the first gulp. Others you sip and proceed to yak chunks of bitter coffee-grains that our throats just can’t handle. Be it the severe info-dumps in the start or the fact that the description moans for a page about a cup and the china patterns on it, sometimes that first chapter is just not your cup of coffee
:'(

P.s just wanna say; Chuck, quite honestly I’ve only been reading your post in intervals for a month or so, but i keep coming back – which i can’t say for most novels or blog-posts for that matter. But damn, you’ve got me hooked. It’s like that Sunday Roast that fat chubby kid inside of me sits through mundane weekday antics for. Yum. keep that delicious chicken coming. <3

Sorry I didn’t bring you any cake but I love this: Imagine telling a story in such a way that if you just quit in the middle of a sentence, you’d leave people hanging with a HOLY SHIT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT look on their dumbfounded faces. Write a book like that. Great post!

I agree with Tymber—if I don’t want to keep reading at the end of the Kindle preview, I’m not buying it.
I also agree with all these points. Another thing I’d say is lack of conflict or any kind of plot. You’d be amazed how many books have no clear plot, because the writer avoided conflict like the plague. That kind of speaks to the last point.

Hmm, excellent writery points here. I’d love to share them with my son, as he’s writing any number of stories at any given time and could use a little direction in some of these areas. But as he’s only 11, I’d have to remove just a few choice words before sharing it with him… making it much less fun to read.

I also notice the older I get, the more ok I become with quietly putting a book down and eventually sending it off to the used bookstore. I used to push my way through some real stinkers under the guise of “learning what not to do.” Then I realized much of that stuff was so bad it never would have occurred to me in the first place, and I ended up just hating reading by the end of it. If I’m not reading to be informed or happy, what’s the point?

And I like the points about the beginning of a story needing context. I think what happens is writers have the nugget of an idea, start writing, let it all solidify and then never go back to fix those first pages. I’ve added prologues in the past purely to fix those issues.

I used to call #6 “The Gilmore Girls Problem.” But then I started calling it “The Grey’s Anatomy Problem.” It CAN be done right (see “His Girl Friday” with Rosalind Russell & Cary Grant) when there’s a damned good reason why two particular characters would sound similar, but that has to be done in away that reader understands it is intentional, and has to be very distinct from everyone else in the story.

There are storytellers and then there are people that tell a story. If the writer is just telling a story, I’m done. If, on the other hand, the writer is a storyteller then it’s game on and don’t interrupt me until I consume the entire book. A storyteller can enthrall me with the same story over and over again. With every rereading of a storyteller’s tale there will be bits and pieces that you missed the first or third or fifth time you read it. A storyteller’s characters come alive for you, they live and breathe and live their lives in a reality just a side step and a heartbeat away from your own. A storyteller’s characters are the kind you discuss with other folks as though they are actual people that you’re acquainted with.

There are a lot of people out there telling stories. There aren’t many good storytellers being published any more.

I can only remember ever putting down 2 books. One was military SF whose title now eludes me, but it consisted merely of battle, strategy discussion, battle, strategy discussion. No character development, no personal stakes, nothing interesting to me at all. Just dry descriptions of space war with an alien enemy we never meet.

The other–and this is a little embarrassing, please don’t hate me–is Crime and Punishment. So help me, I have tried twice, very hard, to get through this book, but I just cannot relate to or empathize with Raskolnikov (the MC). It feels like one long self-pity trip. Maybe someday I’ll try again, as my SO greatly wants to discuss it with me, but wow. It’ll take some serious effort on my part.

Bonus: Recently finished a book I wish I hadn’t wasted my time on. Very embarrassing, so I won’t even give away the title, but the book and author are considered foundations of 20th century SF. Had high hopes for it. Problem? NOTHING EVER HAPPENED. Chapter after sexist chapter of men sitting around discussing society. Got to the end, closed the book, threw it against a wall. If you think you can guess the book and also had problems with it, feel free to reply.

Sorry, that last comment got posted somehow out of time order.
Here’s a part review of Foundation found on Good Reads.
It inadvertently references a number of points made in Chuck’s article.

Andy Wenman rated it one star.

I read some short stories by Asimov in High-School and although he never measured up to the likes Rohald Dahl or Kurt Vonnegut I seem to remember actually enjoying some of them, but there’s no way I can pretend that this novel was anything other than awful.

This is bad science fiction in every sense of the word, overly descriptive of irrelevant details, filled soulless characters all with the same emotionless analytical voice, events that seem to have no purpose and all take place in a world that’s extremely difficult to contextualise and even harder to care about and written with no style or eye for pacing.

I read at least half of the book and I honestly can’t tell you what was happening, who any of the characters were or what was at stake. This is one of those books that is so uninteresting it’s actually infuriating.

Great science fiction uses the conceits of the genre to deal with big philosophical and questions and confront socio-political constructs, but it makes the reader care about these issues by putting a relatable character with basic human dilemmas at the centre.

This is where Foundation fails, it’s all ideas and no humanity. I’d love to disseminate it more, but honestly, who cares? Who the hell even cares? Do not recommend.

SamKD
August 10, 2016 @
8:23 AM

Took So. Much. Crap. for hating the Foundation series back in the day even though I would always praise his robot stuff. Thank you for letting me know I’m not alone.

Hokey, sappy writing. If I roll my eyes so much in the first chapter that my eyeballs start to hurt, I’m done. How to define hokey, sappy writing? I DON’T KNOW! It’s just a certain quality that makes me immediately think “OMG – barf.” I make my beta readers tell me of any instance in my work where they’ve had the OMG-barf reaction and I delete that mother-effer right away. The only hokey writing I will tolerate is Dean Koontz because he’s, well, Dean Koontz, and his books are my secret (not anymore), shameful addiction.

I do occasional reviews for a site or two, and the books that are the hardest are the “meh” books. The ones that are, uh, okay. Readable, snags the interest at the start and then, meh. But if I’ve received an ARC, it’s kind of expected that I say something.
When I’m reading for myself, I’ll sometimes go back to a book and think, “Hey, this is good.” I just had to be in the right mood for it.
But yeah. All the above.

I primarily write short stories, and so this is where my ice-cream-farmer too-much-knowledge reflex tends to kick in. Particularly if a short story is just over– but did not “conclude.” There’s pacing and flow and language involved in making the ending feel complete.

For novels, I used to almost always finish things, before I was married and had kids and a demanding job and started writing in my spare time. Now, I’ll bail out more readily than before.

Besides a book just boring me, or that it turned out to be a genre I don’t like (e.g., romance masquerading as mystery/sci-fi/etc.), #17 and #18 are big turnoffs. I want to have a sense of being drawn to the characters or the situation before you start dumping all of your details on me. I think of the opening of Jasper Fforde’s “Shades of Gray” as a exposition well done, even though it isn’t one of his more popular books. By the first 3 pages, which begin with a father and son vacationing on the way to a new job in a new town, I’ve learning that the setting is a slightly dystopian anti-technological AU version of Earth in which people can only see, at most, a single color out of the spectrum. But I’ve also learned that we’re down to the Last Rabbit, and that the narrator is good-natured but a little dippy. So, humor, personality, and context, all with a light hand.

For voice, I don’t want necessarily want the SAME voice in all of an author’s novels (i.e., brand). But I want to feel as if the story is being confidently presented by the writer– they know how they want to pull you through the story (abstract narration, for 3rd person) or the narration evokes the character telling the story. Voice is really important to me– in my own writing, it drives the character and direction very strongly if I can “hear” the voice.

#22 and #24… this is why thrillers often don’t work for me. Too much focus on just the plot, and pretty soon events and characters are just pawns in a progression of a sometimes improbable and forced story arc.

#15 and #19… also work in reverse, for me. I cannot stand Hemingway’s prose style (short and choppy), let alone his subject matter. But turgid prose or anything that feels like a slog… I don’t want to read that either. OR… cannot string a sentence together in any focused manner. I haven’t read the Twilight books, but I’ve seen excerpts posted on the Internet that look like the author lost track of the point mid-sentence, perhaps more than once.

If there is cake, though, you never know. I read “The Dog Stars” all the way through, despite being incredibly annoyed with the sentence fragments and lack of helpful punctuation. Because in the end, it was an unusual story with feeling and worry and a bittersweet feeling of human truth that kept me hooked until the end.

All of these definitely fit me for TV shows. Less with books though, because these days I am VERY picky about books I buy (tend to stick to the same authors/series unless something comes highly recommended by a friend, or an author I like that I follow on Twitter).

Shows like Criminal Minds and CSI, are for mine, major-stakes players in the ‘every character talks the same’ crime. Even minor characters like a homeless person interviewed as a witness will come across as being requisite masters of the smart-alecky, sarcastic comeback/remark.

There are a lot of these I can agree with. Not all of them, but a lot of them. Though, they don’t necessarily stop me from reading a book. I usually have to have a lot of these reasons not to read a book.

My biggest pet peeve is when I don’t like ANY of the characters, or care what happens to them. What’s the point of reading on if that’s true? Especially when I don’t like the protagonist (this happened with a very popular series that many people love…I just thought everyone in the book was MEAN, and the antagonist was so horrible and over the top, I couldn’t handle it). If you can’t make me care about even one of the characters, I’m not reading your book.

Holy hell you’re fussy. I mean really fussy. And so damned right! Trying to nab reads is a real bitch. I mean, trying to produce something that will grab and engage someone is one of the greater goals of any writer. We tell the story to get it out of our heads and slap it on paper to make it real. We have to love it and believe in it or it’s going to fall flat from the get go. But does it pass the litmus test? Does it hook someone from start to finish? Your 25 reasons has put the fear of Chuck in me. Just saying. This is worth sharing. It’s a good reminder of what we’re up against. Thanks for keeping it real.

On the subject of fussiness, if any of these 25 faults exist on their own in a novel it’s likely not going to be a deal-breaker since that weakness can be offset by the things the author does well. But five or six misdemeanors heaped together will, for a lot of readers, result in that barely audible – yet in personal judgement terms – megaphone-loud sound of a book being prematurely closed for the final ever time.

(covers ears from booming megaphone) Ouch! It’s true. Writing has a learning curve. These talky points mean volumes but only after the piece is written. Running in with your tail between your legs worrying about the “what ifs” can flat line the creative process. I’m taking any and all advice to heart. Like you said, five or six misdemeanors and it’s a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the author.